There is a growing interest in new and better ways to economically and efficiently harvest ambient energy to power electronic devices using photovoltaic, piezoelectric, electrodynamic, thermoelectric and other power generating technologies as replacements for or in augmentation of batteries and other conventional power sources.
There is also a growing interest in the development of sensing elements for wide deployment of sensing elements at scattered locations, such as in industrial wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and the like, for remotely determining the status of environmental and other local conditions (temperature, pressure, flow rate, fill level, chemical presence, biological conditions, etc.), under circumstances requiring dependable portable power sources but where batteries or battery power alone may not be adequate.